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Barack Obama and the Myth of the Strong Leader

President Barack Obama is often criticized for weak international leadership, most recently in relations with Russia and the current crisis in Ukraine. Sen. John McCain, for instance—just one of many critics who have joined the attack—described the Obama administration’s unwillingness to supply military hardware to the provisional Ukrainian government as “yet another sign of weakness.”

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But there is a difference between being a strong leader and being a wise leader. Self-consciously strong leaders—those who are intent on dominating the policy process both domestically and internationally—are too easily tempted into overreaction, especially militarily, at times of crisis. Obama, thankfully, has managed to avoid that.

What the rest of the world would rather see in the American presidency—and what is in America’s best interest—is not strong leadership but enlightened leadership. Think back to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when President John F. Kennedy rejected advice to bomb Soviet ships bound for Cuba and to destroy the missile sites that had been constructed there. Although the United States ultimately convinced the Soviet Union to withdraw its nuclear missiles from the island, the Americans also made concessions, promising they would not attempt to remove the Castro regime by force and pledging to withdraw American missiles from Turkey. As part of the settlement, it was agreed that this latter concession would not be publicized. It would, moreover, occur after an interval just long enough to suggest that it was not a concession to Soviet demands. So while the myth was that only Khrushchev had blinked, in reality Kennedy had been sensible enough to blink too, rather than risk catastrophic nuclear war. This was enlightened leadership; Kennedy won the public relations battle, but the agreement the Americans and the Soviets hammered out was a genuine compromise.

Obama’s caution in foreign affairs comes as a welcome change after the naive optimism of President George W. Bush and the debacle of the invasion of Iraq, which diminished America’s reputation internationally and especially in the Arab and the Islamic world. However bad a situation is in any nominally Islamic country, there are scant grounds for imagining that an American military intervention would bring lasting peace rather than new enmities, with much of the animus directed against the United States. Obama’s avoidance of direct military intervention in Libya or in Syria and his preference for dialogue with Iran, rather than an attack on that country, constitute prudent leadership—even if, as his critics on the right have pointed out, these positions do not wrap him in the mantle of a strong leader.

Similarly, Obama should not be faulted for attempting to improve the poor U.S.-Russia relations he inherited, beginning with his oddly named 2009 “reset.” Obama and his advisers were mistaken, though, in their belief that Dmitry Medvedev had a significantly different outlook from Vladimir Putin and that, as president, Medvedev would be the preeminent Russian decision-maker. In reality, Putin was the patron and Medvedev the client, and the job-swap between the two men did not alter that fact.

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That the “reset” ended in failure—with Putin’s return to the presidency, prompt crackdown on opposition and recent takeover of the Crimea—is a result not just of the Obama administration’s misreading of Moscow. It was a consequence of Western policy toward Russia from the early 1990s onwards. At the end of the Cold War a more enlightened American leadership would have brought Russia into new security structures that would have made NATO, and not only the Warsaw Pact, obsolete. Instead, the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, endorsed by President Bill Clinton and continued by Bush, had the effect on Russia that prescient critics—not least, George Kennan—warned it would produce.

When Kennedy was trying to defuse the Cuban missile crisis, he put himself in Nikita Khrushchev’s shoes and considered how he would react to America’s proposals if he were the Soviet leader. But no matter how often Washington assured the Kremlin that NATO’s enlargement was not intended to threaten Russia, that expansion and Bush’s later withdrawal of the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty were perceived in Moscow as hostile. Within the United States this may have looked like strong leadership, but the divide between Washington and Moscow only deepened. American leaders at the time would have been better off following Kennedy’s example, putting themselves in the Russians’ shoes—imagining, for instance, what the U.S. response would have been if the Warsaw Pact had remained intact and, say, Mexico or Canada decided to join it.

Of course, successive post-Soviet Russian leaders have been the authors of many of their own misfortunes. A creeping authoritarianism began under Boris Yeltsin and has accelerated under his hand-picked successor, Putin. Russian nationalism, which was always one of the many strands lying beneath the monolithic façade of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, has become an even stronger force in Russian society. It has been given a tremendous fillip by what is seen in Moscow as American and European Union policies inimical to Russian state interests. But while Russia’s political elite might feel threatened by the EU’s influence in Eastern Europe, the blame for this lies firmly with the elite’s own fear of genuine pluralist democracy.

That brings us back to the current Ukrainian crisis, in which Putin, like many self-consciously “strong leaders” before him, appears to be tempted by the adventurism and overconfidence of a chief executive who has all but stamped out domestic political opposition and avoided sustained public scrutiny. Obama, meanwhile, has been blamed by his Republican opponents for an insufficiently robust response to Russian incursions. He resisted calls to send arms to the provisional government of Ukraine—though that policy was somewhat modified this week by Vice President Joe Biden’s announcement in Kyiv that the United States would supply $8 million in “non-lethal military aid for troops and border guards,” as well as $7 million toward the “health and welfare” of the Ukrainian army. Still, for Russia to accord itself the right to intervene in a neighboring state on behalf of fellow-nationals is unquestionably dangerous. So the Obama administration and the EU have been correct in mounting a hierarchy of sanctions and giving Russia incentives at each stage to contribute to a negotiated settlement of the crisis. The prospect of more severe Western economic sanctions must remain on the table in the event of further Russian encroachment. Once again, a measured approach, rolled out over time, is preferable to the “strong” leadership the hawks were quick to demand.

The histories and populations of Russia and Ukraine have been, and remain, so intertwined that the protests in Kyiv and the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych were a matter of greater concern to Russia than to any other country apart from Ukraine itself. Subsequent Russian actions, starting with the annexation of Crimea, have monumentally complicated Moscow’s task of re-establishing good relations with a government representing the majority of Ukrainians. Yet there is enough territorially based solidarity with Russia, and opposition in parts of Eastern Ukraine to a Western-oriented Kyiv government, to give the Kremlin great leverage. It has ample opportunity to make life difficult for any Ukrainian government that uses an electoral majority to impose uniform policies on parts of the country with a different sense of cultural identity.

It’s particularly important that Secretary of State John Kerry and his EU allies, when brokering an agreement with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, accepted the need for some devolution of political power in Ukraine. By doing so, the Obama team is testing Putin’s good faith. If the Russian leadership is genuinely interested in a united Ukraine (minus Crimea), and one with a reasonable devolution of power to the regions, the Russians should be restraining their agents and devotees in Eastern Ukraine. So far, unfortunately, there has been little sign of this happening.

It is worth comparing Ukraine to the successful transition from authoritarianism to democracy in Spain, which turned out to be governable on a unitary basis only under authoritarian rule. The democratization of the country after Francisco Franco’s death was achieved partly through the devolution of power among the country’s autonomous regions—with greater power accorded to the more culturally distinct regions of Catalonia and the Basque country than to other parts of this quasi-federal state. A state as new as Ukraine, which has not been blessed by the quality of its post-Soviet leaders (and still less by its earlier Soviet overlords), is not immune from these requirements of democracy-building. To the extent that the Obama administration has recognized those realities, it is a cause for congratulation, not condemnation.

Too many in Russia worship the false god of the strong leader, and while that is part of Putin’s appeal, he also benefits from a much more widespread feeling in Russian society that a country that played a leading part in ending the Cold War has been treated like a defeated enemy. The last thing Obama should do is follow suit. What Ukraine needs, and what the United States should advocate, is wise, bridge-building leadership—not a strongman. Self-consciously strong leaders tend to be afraid of nothing so much as being perceived as weak, and this clouds their judgment. A questioning mind, an ability to grasp political problems in all their complexity, flexibility and, if we are lucky, vision serves a leader much better than the overrated criterion of strength.

Archie Brown, emeritus professor of politics at the University of Oxford, is author of The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age, published this month by Basic Books.